What Is It?

Features

Megapixels: 6

Optical Zoom: 6x (35-210mm equiv)

Macro down to 1cm

Full manual control available

A fairly decent little camera – not quite a superzoom, not quite pocketable, not quite cheap, but probably good enough at most things that it stands a good chance of being enough of everything to a lot of people.

My Opinion

The PowerShot A700 looks like a very nice camera. For me, though, it falls between two things I would want: it’s not quite got enough zoom to make it a real superzoom like the S3 IS, but is also not quite small enough to go everywhere in a pocket like my little Ixus 750. It would make a pretty reasonable compromise between the two, but you’d have to carry it in a pouch, or at least a fairly big pocket. If you don’t mind that, though, it’s a very well-featured camera, with an unusually good zoom range for its class, and well worth considering.

Reviews

Other than the longer zoom, its feature set is similar to other Canon A-series cameras with full-manual controls including custom-white balance, manual focusing and image adjustment parameters. Other compact digital cameras offer a similar feature set, but these are the minority.

While it’s name makes it sound like the top-end camera in Canon’s A-series, that’s up for debate. While it does offer more zoom than the other models, it has less resolution and doesn’t offer a rotating LCD display like the PowerShot A620.

Its combination of automatic and manual features make it very approachable for novices, but interesting for experienced users, the net result being a camera that will satisfy a broad range of interests and provide a good path for novice users to expand their photographic horizons as their experience grows. The 6x zoom lens is quite easy to hand-hold under reasonably bright lighting, but as the light fades, the A700’s lack of image stabilization will come to be more of a factor.